The US promised more military support for Ukraine, including drones, and is considering whether to send fighter aircraft, as Russian forces relentlessly shelled towns and cities in the east with the war about to enter its sixth month.
Moscow and Kyiv signed a landmark deal on Friday that raised hopes of unblocking vast grain exports from Black Sea ports.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hailed the accord, but with heavy fighting continuing on several fronts, he said there could be no ceasefire unless lost territory was retaken.
Photo: AFP
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“Freezing the conflict with the Russian Federation means a pause that gives the Russian Federation a break for rest,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
“Society believes that all the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead,” he said.
There have been no breakthroughs on the front lines since Russian forces seized the last two Ukrainian-held cities in the eastern province of Luhansk late last month and early this month.
Russian forces failed to establish control over Ukraine’s second-biggest power plant at Vuhlehirska, northeast of Donetsk, and troops tried to advance west from the city of Lysychansk, but were pushed back, the Ukrainian General Staff of the Armed Forces said.
A number of people were killed and wounded when 13 Russian missiles hit a military airfield and railway infrastructure in the central region of Kirovohrad yesterday, its governor said.
In the southern town of Nikopol on the Dnipro river, continued Russian shelling killed at least one person, a Ukrainian official said on his Telegram channel.
The attack on Nikopol, the target of more than 250 rockets in the past week, damaged 11 homes and farm buildings, cut off gas and water pipes, and destroyed a railway track, said Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the Military Administration of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine.
Up river in the Dnipropetrovsk region, rockets targeted a town and nearby villages, regional governor Valentyn Reznychenko said.
Heavy fighting has taken place over the past 48 hours as Ukrainian forces continued their offensive against Russia in Kherson Oblast, west of the Dnipro river, British military intelligence said yesterday.
“Supply lines of the Russian forces west of the river are increasingly at risk,” the British Ministry of Defence said in an intelligence update.
In the northeast, “several powerful strikes” yesterday morning hit the center of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote in a post on Telegram.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not immediately reply to a request for comment outside regular hours.
Kyiv hopes that its gradually increasing supply of western arms, such as US High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), will allow it to recapture territory.
Russia’s defense ministry on Friday said its forces had destroyed four HIMARS systems between July 5 and Wednesday, which was refuted by the US and Ukraine.
Ukraine’s mayor of Russian-occupied city Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, reported that two explosions were heard early yesterday at the Azov Sea resort Kyrylivka, where he said Russia had moved material to avoid becoming targets for HIMARS.
“They hoped that neither our HIMARS nor the armed forces and the resistance movement would get them there, but someone definitely got them,” Fedorov said from territory still in Ukrainian hands.
Reuters could not verify the battlefield reports.
The White House on Friday announced US$270 million in fresh support for Kyiv, saying it was doing preliminary work on whether to send fighter aircraft, although such a move would not happen in the near term.
The Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has caused Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945, forcing millions to flee and turning entire cities to rubble.
The Kremlin says it is engaged in a “special military operation” to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine. Kyiv and its allies say the war is an unprovoked act of aggression.
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